Getting Ready for the Medicine

Someone I don't know has been writing me. He's taken ayahuasca at the camp of famous curandero previously and is now going to go to the curandero's home for another group of sessions with the same curandero. But the first time he was at camp, he drank with 35-40 other people. At the curandero's home he will be with three or four others, no more.

So he asked me what to do to prepare. Should he be fasting? Should he be meditating? Should he be doing this or that?

This was my answer. And though it's not directly an answer to his question, I think it gets to the heart of it to me.

Dear X: Well, I don't know what to say here. People in my groups, I figure they had their regular lives, plus stress, before they arrived in Iquitos. I have 4 1/2 days from the moment they land till they have medicine. I don't ask them to do anything before hand, but when they arrive I take them to a breakfast of fruit and yogurt, let them shower and shave, then take them to the local prison in Iquitos. From there I take them to the oddest, scariest graveyard in the world where we have a ceremony over Julio's grave. From there I take them to a place where they see fantastic animals. From there we go eat grub worms, then dinner of fish and chicken, eaten with fingers. That night, still their first night in Iquitos, they are taken to a dance hall where 2000 people are dancing to an 18-piece band.

So my style is to blow them so freaking out of their own world with a combination of horrible stuff and beauty that they don't know/remember their own names. And the second day is as bad and hard as the first. Then comes 15 hours on a riverboat, after the armpit tour of Iquitos' poorest, most dangerous neighborhoods. Then comes sitting in Herrera for 8 hours in the pitch black with no food/water, waiting for sun up and breakfast. Then transfer to a small oversized canoe for two hours on the Amazon (called the Ucayali up there) with no life jackets and the boat needing to be cleaned of water continually. Then, that third night, after we get to camp, I send them out, without me, into the river with my team in genuine dugout canoes for several hours. No flashlights, no talking, just listening to the jungle.

Next morning I get them up at 6 AM and have them hiking to collect the medicine by 7 AM, and after breakfast send them out on a 4 hour hike in the high jungle.

By the time that's all done and they've come back and washed in the river--no showers allowed--they are pretty clean and ready for the medicine. It's a bit brutal but fantastic. Cause no one in the world was ever open enough for the spirits--who often whisper--while they are still remembering their lives in another country, or whether they left enough dog food out or remembered to alert the television company to suspend service while they are out of town. My trip is designed to make you forget all that in a serious freaking hurry.

The result? People can hear the whispering and it changes their life. That's what I'm after. To allow them a moment when they are unsaddled from their normal concerns and open to the changes being offered them.